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Just getting in on the tail end of this, but there’s a feisty appreciation of action director Tony Scott in the winter issue of Cinema Scope, the invaluable Canadian film quarterly, that–up to a point, anyway–seems to me very long overdue. The two authors, Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson, insist that Scott’s critical reputation, as “ADD action hack” and axiomatic Jerry Bruckheimer house pet, isn’t nearly what it ought to be, and I’d say bully to that–yeah, he’s way better now than stodgy old Ridley, the brother from another planet whose search for the respectability of Oscar (“maturity” is what they call it, I guess) has turned him little by little into the cinematic equivalent of a stately mahogany chest. Wasn’t always that way though, and in the beginning it was Tony who seemed criminally deficient in chops–lots of flashy iconographic posturing and Top Gun attitude, with hard-metal surfaces the sum of what he aspired to be about: no soul moments please, might spoil the reflections on the windshields, the hood-ornament highlights … Which is still largely true, fortunately or unfortunately, though over the last 10 to 15 years (since Crimson Tide per Huber/Peranson, though I’d vote for ’93’s True Romance as critical turning point) he’s arguably taken everything to a higher level–or at least another level, where sheer edited density, an almost literal exfoliation of images, like pointillistic waves, has become the rough equivalent of ordinary narrative investigation. Think Marcel L’Herbier, arch-cinematic impressionist of the 20s, and the frenzied aestheticizing begins to make more than a little sense.
